In one of the craziest elections in American history, Barack Obama overcame a lack of experience, a funny name, two candidates who are political institutions and the racial divide to become the 44th President of the United States

Craig Venter

David Deal for TIME

What do you do when you're done sequencing the human genome? If you're Craig Venter, you write a new genome from scratch. This year the maverick geneticist pried even further into the secrets of life by painstakingly assembling 582,970 base pairs into the genome of an entirely new organism, a fully synthetic bacterium named Mycoplasma genitalium. The future could bring micro-organisms custom-designed to produce biofuels.